On the instability of De Gregorio excited states

We prove that all excited states $-\sin (nx)$, $n\ge 2$, of the De Gregorio equation on the torus are nonlinearly unstable in the sense of Hadamard. More precisely, perturbations arbitrarily small in $H^2$ leave a fixed $H^1$ neighborhood of the state. For every $n\ge 2$, the linearized operator has a real eigenvalue ${\lambda }_n\in (0.56,0.6)$. To prove this, we transform the eigenvalue problem into a Fuchsian equation on the complex disk and obtain a matching condition for the eigenvalue. This condition is verified rigorously using interval arithmetic. The nonlinear instability follows from a bootstrap argument in the spirit of Guo, Hallstrom, and Spirn.